Today’s college students are immersed into social media while American corporations are looking for employees with such skills after investing heavily into digital marketing.

So, Ball State University created the Center for Advancement of Digital Marketing and Analytics (CADMA), providing students with the certifications, classes and on-site work to prepare them to handle digital marketing in the business world upon graduation.

“In developing CADMA, we found that major corporations have heavily invested in social media command centers, but few universities have created something similar for educating the next generation of technology workers,” said Eric Harvey, the center’s director and a marketing professor. “When it comes to this field, the average starting salary is just shy of $50,000 and companies — from the largest Fortune 500 firms to small start-ups — are seeking well-educated, highly motivated people to fill these positions.”

CADMA includes a social media lab, which is designed to educate students and help them hone skills they learned in digital marketing and analytics courses, including examining consumer behavior, professional selling and content development.

About 100 students have received or are working on social media marketing certifications using teaching modules provided by Google and other major technology firms around the world.

Instead of hitting the beach and soaking up rays over spring break, 13 Ball State students will immerse themselves in professional baseball by producing stories of interest to residents of Indiana and surrounding areas.

Ball State Spring Training will be led March 2-9 by telecommunications professors Suzy Smith and Tim Underhill. Students will report from spring training — an annual event that helps Major League Baseball (MLB) players prepare for the upcoming season and gives minor league players a chance to move up to “The Big Show.”

Students will be responsible for contacting teams and setting up access, organizing and confirming travel, interviewing sources, and producing stories.

“This is an opportunity for our students to work as professional journalists,” Smith said. “Every student will have an opportunity to file a story from a major or minor league baseball training site.”

Students will visit spring training sites of the Houston Astros, New York Mets, Washington Nationals, Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins. MLB has 12 teams near the coastlines and three in the center of Florida playing in the Grapefruit League.

“We know that the Midwest has a great deal of interest in pro baseball with the popularity of MLB teams in Chicago, St. Louis and Cincinnati as well as minor league team scattered around,” she said. “At the same time, we have former college and high school players now in the training camps as well as lots of (Midwest) retirees who make their winter homes in Florida. So, there are a lot of great stories out there.”

Todd Trappe (left) and Scott Trappe (right) work on a research project at Ball State’s Human Performance Laboratory.

Ball State University will partner with two other major research institutions as part of a national project to uncover how exercise changes the body on a molecular level, which could lead to people engaging in more targeted and optimized activities.

The three partners will share a projected $6.6 million over six years, 2017-23, as part of a $170 million NIH investment for the largest, most complex and highly coordinated human exercise physiology training study in the field’s history.

“The NIH initiative is a moonshot opportunity for the exercise community, and the Human Performance Laboratory is honored to be part of the team,” said Scott Trappe, the John and Janice Fisher Endowed Chair of Exercise Science and director of the Human Performance Laboratory in Ball State’s newly formed College of Health. “This is a new frontier that will move the field forward to better understand the health benefits of exercise.”

Under the $170 million project, 19 grants will support researchers working around the country, including seven clinical trial sites and several analytical sites to collect samples from people of different races, ethnic groups, sex, ages and fitness levels.

“We have long understood that exercising is beneficial to our overall health; however, we still do not understand why,” NIH director Francis S. Collins said in a statement. “The development of a so-called molecular map of circulating signals produced by physical activity will allow us to discover, at a fundamental level, how physical activity affects our health.

Under the national research initiative, researchers will partner to develop plans to recruit people for clinical trials, identify how to analyze tissue samples and select animal models to best replicate human studies.

Investigators across the country will recruit a total of about 3,000 healthy men and women of different fitness levels, ages, races and ethnicities. Each clinical site will enroll and study 450 to 500 participants. Researchers will collect blood, urine and tissue samples from the volunteers, who will perform resistance or aerobic exercises as part of the national study.

During the first year, clinical site teams will finalize plans and responsibilities. Trappe said HPL will quickly ramp up operations, including adding more researchers and post-doctoral students, to begin work in 2017. He will be a co-director of the test site; Todd Trappe, a Ball State exercise science professor, will be a co-principal investigator for the site.

Toby Chambers, a first-year doctoral student in Ball State’s human bioenergetics program, believes the NIH project underscores the national reputations Ball State and HPL have developed.

“As a doctoral student in the Human Performance Laboratory, I am really excited about the learning opportunities that will result from the research team’s involvement,” he said. “The unique opportunities this presents to the research team are why individuals, like myself, continue to be attracted to the HPL at Ball State.”